Both Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels may have believed their long-running battle over a $130,000 “hush money” payment made to Daniels in the final stages of the 2016 presidential campaign was over, especially after Daniels' lawsuit against Trump was finally dismissed earlier this year, as AVN.com reported.
But, in a potentially dangerous development for Trump, the district attorney for the New York City borough of Manhattan, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has opened his own, local investigation into the Daniels payoff, and according to a New York Times report on Thursday, has now slapped the Trump Organization, Trump’s private business, with a subpoena for any documents relating to the hush money deal.
Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen is now serving a three-year federal prison term, partly on charges relating to the hush money deal to silence Daniels over a sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006—a deal Cohen was instrumental in engineering. But Cohen’s testimony as well as recently unsealed FBI documents showed that Trump himself ordered Cohen to set up the hush money deal, and directed the surreptitious process every step of the way.
But Trump, identified in court papers, now famously, as “Individual 1,” was not indicted for the same campaign finance violation stemming from the hush money deal for which Cohen now sits behind bars. According to a source who spoke to USA Today, a Justice Department edict that prohibits the indictment of any president while still in office prevented Trump from facing consequences over the illegal hush money payoff to Daniels.
The new, local investigation comes a month after federal prosecutors said that they had concluded their inquiry into the hush money payoff, which was ruled by courts to be an illegal campaign donation. But local and state prosecutors would not be bound by the edict against indicting a sitting president that has reportedly tied the hands of federal prosecutors, as Vox.com explains. New York State law prohibits falsifying of business records, and that law—rather than campaign finance law—forms the basis for the local investigation, according to The Times.
Marc L. Mukasey, a Trump Org attorney, condemned the new investigation as a “political hit job” and “harassment of the President,” saying, “”We will respond as appropriate,” as quoted by CNN.
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